The food at your service

Overview

We've been asked for social distancing, we can't find toilet paper, eggs, or bread, and people's jobs have been jeopardized. It's Corona mayhem and everything in our daily routine has crashed. 

Working at Indeed, most employees develop a routine of going to the cafeteria for 2, sometimes 3 meals a day. This is an excellent perk and allows us to save money, optimize our work routine, diets, and internal collaboration. In turn, this can make grocery quantities hard to stock and the pantry left empty. 

Now that we all are on remote lockdown, the grocery is a treacherous place to go. People are all over. It’s hard to keep the 6 ft distance and it can be challenging to get all the ingredients for a recipe. 

Recently, I’ve indulged in having a meal prep service to combat some of this which most consider expensive. Throughout this post, I’ll discuss the pros and cons of the service I use and my perspective on the cost of leveraging such a thing. 

What is a meal prep service?

When you consider making any meal, there’s a fairly standard process. You have a recipe that dictates the ingredients required, temperature, and portion/serving sizes. Well, that’s what the service provides… at your doorstep. 

You get to preselect meals, customize various options around diets, and receive portioned ingredients without the hassle of traditional shopping. 

Why is this better?

Let’s break down traditional grocery shopping. Assuming you know the meals you want to make, you have a defined set of ingredients you need to buy. We spend time driving to the store, walking around looking for groceries, standing in line, and commuting back home. This turnaround is even more intense with the COVID-19 methods of purchasing what we need. 

Now you’re at home and preparing the ingredients tied to the recipe you have. Out of all the groceries you purchased you are going to take a portion of that for this specific recipe you want to make. Then you have the standard time to cook the meal, just as you would with the meal prep service and time to indulge in this nice delicacy you’ve prepared. You might be fortunate to prepare the correct portion size to how many people are going to eat the food; which is good. You don’t have the additional food waste from not eating all the leftovers. 

Depending on the grocery you went to and how long it’s been before you are ready to cook this recipe, you have fresh ingredients. All of this is fairly standard across going to the grocery vs the meal prep service. But, let’s break down a few things we may or may not think about. 

Cost Benefits

Most grocery trips range from $50 - ~$200 if you have a family to feed. These groceries will last us for about two weeks or maybe less for certain items. We might drive anywhere from 2 - 10 miles to get to the store and with current gas prices (assuming $2/gallon and the average vehicle at 18/mpg) driving to and from the gas station costs around $4, maybe. 

There’s a number of undeterminable cost benefits of going to the grocery vs the meal prep service. A few of these fall with the time cost for us to shop, the decision fatigue in searching for recipes we want to make, and lastly the decision fatigue of selection bias for various brands we favor. Do you grab Kraft or Hill Country Fare?

When you bring all this together, is the meal prep service expensive? I’m paying anywhere from $50 - $80 for portioned ingredients, defined recipes, and meals delivered at my doorstep. This doesn’t factor in those of us who like to eat out or go to happy hours for appetizers. Nonetheless, we are paying on average $10 a meal to avoid the selection bias, travel time, shopping time, and potential food waste. 

Alternatives

Ok, Ross, this all sounds like nirvana but there’s also a ton of other options for purchasing food. What does that look like?

1. Grocery curbside pickup
2. Instacart delivery
3. Take out

Grocery Curbside Pickup

This is a great middle ground. We still have the selection bias challenges with deciding what we want to eat without the time of shopping, but we might be subject to food waste because we buy too much or not enough. 

InstaCart Delivery

I consider this synonymous to curbside pickup in many ways. One of the greatest things about Instacart are options for various establishments. You have HEB, Sprouts, Costco, Trader Joes, and others. Something like Costco typically has a membership for you to be able to shop there. With Instacart, they manage the membership for you, so you save the monthly cost there. 

Before all the COVID-19 mayhem, I leveraged Instacart for my monthly paper goods. This allowed me to buy bulk orders of toilet paper, tissues, and paper towels without the hassle of hauling it to and from the store all while skirting the membership for Costco. Many win-wins in my book. 

Currently, Instacart is about a week out on delivery schedules, which isn’t too different from paying for the meal prep service. You are just subject to those ingredients being in stock and selecting suitable replacements when it’s not. 

Take Out

I like to think we all know this is the most expensive option for eating. Take out has nice amenities. When I say take out, I don’t necessarily mean taking the food to go, but dining at an establishment which currently isn’t an option during COVID-19. 

Restaurant dining provides an atmosphere. You get to order your drink instead of walking to the fridge, you get refills as you please, and you don’t have to do dishes. These are all quality of life gains that we can’t quantify to a dollar perspective. 

There are apps like Open Table that can streamline the pain points of eating out and filtering down our selection bias to optimize the process of going out. I enjoy the occasional dine out session, but nothing I’m willing to build into a daily routine. 

Meals at your service

We’ve covered a wide variety of information and now let’s take a deeper look at this whole meal prep service that sounds like Nirvana. For the $50 - $80 I spend each week, what are the amenities I get? 

Using Hello Fresh, I can customize a few different diet options. 

• Meat & Veggies
• Veggie
• Family Friendly 
• Variety
• Calorie Smart
• Quick & Easy
• Seafood Free
• Pork Free
• Beef Free
• Pescatarian

This covers most diet restrictions and provides a wide enough menu that I’m not tired of what I’m eating. Most of the time I’ve done weekly meal prep, I get tired of eating that meal over the course of the week. 

All of these options come portioned for 2 or 4 people. You also have the nice benefit of picking the menu before it ships the next week. This provides a nice variety of recipes to make, challenges your cooking repertoire, and prevents food waste. Most might undervalue the recipes you get, though who would think to put chopped onions in a balsamic glaze on a cheese-stuffed burger with a chive mayonnaise?

One of the challenges I’ve had with the meal prep service is the backlog of deliveries. Since these are fresh ingredients delivered weekly, you better cook those recipes or else you are going to end up with a fridge full of spoiled food. 

A feature I wish they had is a mix and match of microwave ingredients to the prepared recipes. Something along the lines of combining a service like Freshly with the Hello Fresh amenities. 

Conclusion

Having a meal prep service is nice, you enjoy a number of nice quality of life improvements for food. It’s roughly cost-effective for a nice meal in comparison to eating out and not having to worry about food waste is something fairly important to me.

At the end of the day, the benefits are there but it doesn’t holistically take care of your groceries. You are being provided 2-4 meals a week and even with the leftovers, you need other things to eat in the house. 

With the amenities my office provides to me, the Hello Fresh situation works really well. Now that we are all homebound, having a hybrid approach to groceries is necessary. It provides enough variation of creativity, challenging your repertoire in the kitchen, and doesn’t cost you an arm and a leg for a cooking class. 

I’m not sure there will be a day that I don’t recommend the meal prep service, but it is something you need to consider the various factors towards. The costs can easily escape you. 

To anyone who has read this far, please stay safe and healthy. Eat well and consider the COVID-19 challenges as you indulge in groceries and the essentials during this time.